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‘Elf and Safety Nonsense.

The Anna Raccoon Archives

by Anna Raccoon on June 15, 2010

When a raft overturned on the Clear Creek in Arkansas, one of the casualties was a 13 year old girl who had been undergoing training in the art of piloting a few rudimentary logs roped together through a maelstrom of turbulent water.

One guide swam to shore and used his mobile phone to call the emergency services as he saw the girl swept down river.

The other guide swam after her, braving rapids, rocks and other detritus.

By the time he caught up with her, the emergency services had arrived.

Following full health and safety procedures, they were consulting their rule book, assembling their ropes, ladders, briefing their rescuers and ensuring that they had done a full risk assessment and were properly attired.

Meanwhile, our intrepid guide was still battling his way down river through the rapids in pursuit of his drowning 13 year old student.

He got out of the river and ran the final distance in order to arrive at a point before her. He jumped in again, swam out to her, successfully saved her and brought her to the shore. Whew!

Er, not so whew! The official search and rescue team were furious. They complained to the sheriff. Not their fault that they had to follow the correct steps before they actually did anything was it? ‘Elf and Safety innit?

28 year old rafting guide Ryan Snodgrass has been charged with ‘obstructing a government operation’. No really, he has.

“He was told not to go in the water, and he jumped in and swam over to the victim and jeopardized the rescue operation,” said Clear Creek Sheriff Don Krueger, noting that his office was deciding whether to file similar charges against another guide who was at the scene just downstream of Kermit’s Roadhouse on U.S. 6.

The boss of the Rafting Company has said:

“Making contact immediately with your victim is essential. It’s not about who is in charge. It’s about the safety of a 13-year-old girl. You are going to do everything in your power to ensure the safety of your guest, and if that means in Idaho Springs you get arrested, well I guess we’ll just get arrested.”

You couldn’t make it up.

{19 comments }

ChalcedonJune 16, 2010 at 16:23

The only good side of this is it demonstrates that there are fuckwits in the USA as stupid, brainless and wretched as there are over here when it comes to the emergency services and the police. We are not alone. Otherwise you could be forgiven for thinking we have a monopoly on this sort of nonsense. Health & safety law should not apply to these rescue services or the police FORCE!

boflJune 16, 2010 at 10:41

what the papers never say……..

no of course we dont want people injured or killed at work.

but the rules are often stupid.

and what about brown and darling?13 years of pissing money away to massage the dole figures has got us into a real mess. and the banking crisis? didnt those two shit themselves and actually bail out the banks?? none of us asked for that! who arranged the hbos takeover? oh i remember-it was thought up by the worlds worst gold trader-mcmental ………arranged with his ‘friend’ victor blank. (so much for his hatred of the rich +toffs)

keep spending money that you dont have and you will end up in debt……

it is the same for nations too…………

open your eyes and stop spouting bollocks .try thinking for yourself.

and no – i am not a tory

ps. just to get you started ………

it’s all mrs. thatchers fault!

she eats babies!she impales 100 children every morning!

What The Papers Never SayJune 16, 2010 at 09:48

I just wanted to say that because of the general trend of this blog.

What The Papers Never SayJune 16, 2010 at 09:39

Of course if one stoops low enough and scrapes the proverbial barrel, one can always find barking mad stories, enough to denigrate anything or anyone.But let one person here who is indulging in their chosen sport of Gordon Brown knocking (he is no longer PM time to move on) cast the first stone when health and safety is interfered with by this ridiculous dimwitted government, just for the sake of interfering with it and a child or children get her or God forbid worse needlessly. There were reasons why this was brought in and it has already been modified, however, would I expect the grey lady to stop playing political point scoring with health and safety at work? Or in schools etc? Of course I would not, too good an opportunity to miss. Notably the people that quote the daft stories are no doubt the same kind (or possibly the same people) that would quote the silly stories about straight bananas and cucumbers and the size of one’s sausage regarding the EU (they pick these stories up mainly from the Sun apparently – say no more!)When next at work you, your husband, son father, mother, daughter, grandson, granddaughter etc is asked (or forced) to carry out an unsafe procedure by a Tory cost cutting wet behind the ears boss and if you refuse, you are told do it because there are now over one million more Tory unemployed on the register waiting to take your job, they fall and are met with a horrific accident, I hope you all remember you celebrated this insane government and their idiotic messing, for the sake of messing. In the words of “Scameron’s” idol “if it ain’t broke – don’t fix it”!However, carry on throwing the baby out with the bath water, it will not be too long before all of us realise we have an inexperience economically illiterate government in place, lead by a PM that is proving to be a megalomaniac tin pot dictator. Then the “fun” will truly start, if he thinks people will go quietly, he is in for a very rude awakening.

How good Brown and Darling must feel now they have been totally vindicated, the only thing Sir Alan Budd (yes THAT Sir Alan Budd- who got his knighthood from the Tories) was to be able to manage to shave a fraction of percentage off off Darling’s growth predictions and you don’t have to be qualified at Westminster or Oxbridge to understand of course growth would have to be forecast downwards, in fact we will be lucky if we see growth at all, these insane Tory cuts will take care of that.Sir Alan Budd forced to concede that if labour had stayed in power they would have almost cleared the structural deficit inside the next parliament and they would have done that without causing misery to millions.

But hey carry on laughing (while you can) making one million public sector workers pay for the greed of city bankers may seem amusing to you, but when that one million are out of work and have been forced into orange high vis vests for litter picking duties because they cannot find another job try as they might, it is not only they and their families that will suffer. It will be the housing market, the building industry, the soft furnishing stores, supermarkets and local shops, the knock on effect will be enormous.

Yes have a good laugh at health and safety rules, it may be the last laugh you get for a few years, unless this insane pair of ex PR spin doctor spivs are kicked out before they manage to gerrymander parliament and change our constitution and make even that impossible.

Democracy? On here? Oh please “you’re ‘avin a larf, ain’t ya”?

QuentJune 16, 2010 at 02:53

It is interesting that all the English speaking countries are going crazy in the same way at the same time.

SadButMadLadJune 15, 2010 at 23:17

Reading the article and comments on the Denver Post it seems that it is not so clear cut.

The girl was lost for over half an hour before the guides found her, thats why the rescuers (volunteers) managed to turn up so they were probably worried about others having to be rescued too. However, the girl had managed to swim to the other shore downstream. It took the guides just over a half hour to find her. From the sounds of it the guide swam across the river and was most likely trying to keep her calm and warm her up while they waited for the rescuers to do their job.

Having said that, to charge the guide is just plain stupid. It comes across as petty and vindictive for allegedly getting in the way of the “professional” rescuers. So not a H&S issue (mores the pity because its one of my pet hates) but an issue of bad media management by the sheriff’s office and crap decision making in charging the guide for attempting to do a good deed.

DerekPJune 15, 2010 at 23:04

One of the commenters to that story recounts having Sheriff’s Officers (I think) drawing guns on people who wanted to help at other emergencies:“I’ve been turned away, at gunpoint, by SO’s who told me I couldn’t fight a fire because I wasn’t insured.”

I wonder if ALL our police officers, including the ‘thought police’ police, were armed whether this story would be about body retrieval rather than a rescue:“A Strathclyde Police spokesman said: ‘It is not the responsibility of the police to go into the water – it’s the fire and rescue service.’”

Just think of the book George Orwell could have written had he been able to glimpse the state enforced madness of today.

PericlesJune 15, 2010 at 22:09

Something about truth, strangeness and fiction ?

Makes one ashamed to have been a member of the ship

Ed PJune 15, 2010 at 20:04

Do you think they would “follow procedure” if Sheriff Don Krueger had fallen in the water? No, me neither. What a hopeless and idiotic mindset the elf has created.

English VikingJune 15, 2010 at 18:58

The parents should sue the ‘Rescue’ service for dereliction of duty and give the pay-out to the proper chap who saved their daughter.

BrianJune 15, 2010 at 22:58

Unfortunately, that would also put money in the hands of the lawyers who started the defensive health and safety culture.The solution proposed by Dick the Butcher in Henry VI Part 2 has never been bettered.

Remember the old American frontier spirit? When men were men and women let them be men? Remember Pauline trudging through the ice with the baby on her back? Remember all those Buster Keaton stunts, most of which were REAL and performed by Buster himself? Remember a-man’s-gotta-do-what-a-man’s-gotta-do?

No, neither do I. All gone… all forbidden by ‘Elf an’ Safety.

PTJune 15, 2010 at 18:32

Quite right. Correct procedure is more important than correct result. Bureaucracy rules the world, we have the power!

No Where To HideJune 15, 2010 at 17:29

Ps: You can never have too “much”, sigh

English VikingJune 15, 2010 at 18:56

Or ‘two’ much?

No Where To HideJune 15, 2010 at 20:34

Indeed

No Where To HideJune 15, 2010 at 17:28

Proof – if it were needed- of what Brown kept refering to, namely: A New World Order.

So much much for the gradual return of sanity with the removal of NuLiebour, it’s worldwide.